German wind industry “threatening to implode” as subsidies end wiping out half or more of new plants

In Germany as 20 years of wind subsidies comes to an end in 2020, half to three quarters of the industry may disappear.

So many parallels with Australia. The Germans have had wind subsidies for 20 years, but even after two decades of support, the industry is still not profitable on a stand-alone basis. In 2016, some 4600MW of new wind plants were installed, but that may drop to one quarter as much by 2019 as subsidies shrink. According to Pierre Gosselin (August 31st, 2017) there are more wind protests, electricity prices are “skyrocketing” and “the grid has become riddled with inefficiencies and has become increasingly prone to grid collapses from unstable power feed in.”

German flagship business daily “Handelsblatt” reported … how Germany’s wind energy market is now “threatening to implode” and as a result “thousands of jobs are at risk“. José Luis Blanco, CEO of German wind energy giant Nordex, blames the market chaos on “policymakers changing the rules“. Subsidies have been getting cut back substantially. The problem, Blanco says, is that worldwide green energy subsidies are being capped and wind parks as a result are no longer looking profitable to investors. The Handelsblatt writes that “things have never been this bad“.

Development of Germany’s 20-year guaranteed support rates for onshore wind power. Source: CLEW.

Operating wind turbines in Germany will only be profitable for a small fraction of the installations once their 20-year support period via the Renewable Energy Act (EEG) has ended, consultancy Energy Brainpoolsays in a white paper. The first turbines in Germany will lose eligibility for support from the renewables surcharge that customers pay with their power bill in 2021 and “at the current [wholesale power] price level, only a few installations can be operated at a profit” after that due to maintenance costs, the consultancy says.

Maintenance is one of the big hidden costs of trying to collect low density energy from a vast area. All those gears, bearings, and long transmission lines are, by definition, subject to extreme weather. Who builds a wind “farm” in a calm location?

“The situation in the wind power industry is coming to a head much quicker than we feared,” trade union IG Metall recently said in a press release. IG asked dozens of turbine manufacturers and their suppliers about their business prospects. 40 percent expected market conditions to deteriorate in the near future. The German Wind Energy Association (BWE) says companies now have to rely entirely on existing orders, and that “a reliable projection for expansion over the next years is scarcely possible.”

According to Windresearch’s analysis, a worst-case scenario would see just 1,000 mega-watts (MW) of new capacity in 2019, compared to the 2,800 MW set by the EEG and auctioned off. That’s less than a quarter of the onshore wind power capacity added in 2016.

Another hidden cost is complexity

The artificial rules and auction system are being gamed and rorted by the big players:

Gsänger says a lax definition of citizens’ projects has enabled larger bidders to secure a substantial chunk of the tendered volume for themselves, while no truly citizen-led initiative was granted a licence through the second auction. “There’s a great deal of frustration in the citizens’ energy scene,” Gsänger says.

This is always the price of complicated government schemes. No matter how carefully rules are crafted, where there are billions of dollars involved, there are billions of reasons for the top brains in an industry to find the loopholes.

Even socialists in Germany are talking about coal being essential:

Comeback coal

Yesterday at the East German Energy Forum in Leipzig, both the centrist CDU and the SPD socialists were in agreement: brown coal (lignite) must remain a part of Germany’s energy mix, the online Lausitzer Rundschau writes. Speaking before 400 industry representatives, Brandenburg’s Minister President Dietmar Woidke (SPD) complained that green energies are foremost “unreliable energy sources“.

The Germans appear to be way ahead. The socialists in Australia still talk about coal as if it were an anti-christ-dinosaur.

177 comments to German wind industry “threatening to implode” as subsidies end wiping out half or more of new plants

I hope Germany sticks with the subsidy deadline of 2020 and isn’t bamboozled into extending the subsidies. This is their chance to
get out from under the burden of renewables on their economy and their poorest citizens.

Well, we do have the opportunity to point this out, and the zombie of the South Australian renewables debacle just keeps on proving sceptics right.

The simple reality of renewables not working in practical terms has to come home to roost eventually….. unfortunately for the Lefties, it wasnt some chicken, but rather a very cranky 40 tonne emu landing on your house in the middle of the night….

Political reality: Merkel now desperate for a coalition and will “compromise” on anything that sustains her delusion of power and her apparent objective to destroy Germany and all that is “German”. Such includes as a consequence; things that we regard as foundations of Western Civilization.

Germans of the former GDR are not as easily bamboozled, recognizing the state-owned (and often “private”) media for the mouthpiece of dogmatic bias that it is. They are a numeric minority but have somehow managed to produce a stronghold of reason in Saxony.

Quite correct. The citizens of the ex-DDR (East Germany) are familiar with state propaganda and are immune to it – just like the citizens of Russia. Russian TV is quite happy to show CNN with subtitles to make the people know what the Americans are being told. The people there are amazed at how naive the American public is.

We in the West are under the delusion that we have a free press and that what the press says is true and that unpleasant facts are exposed by the press. Young people don’t know that there used be something called investigative journalism. The fiasco in Las Vegas with officialdom and a compliant press changing repeatedly the story line – a story that makes no sense to any reasonably intelligent person – is typical. They have reached the stage where they think (rightly) that they can say whatever they like and change and 90% of the people won’t find that odd.

In reality, Germany – just like Australia BTW – is an American satrapy. All journalists toe the party line and so-called opinion pieces are nothing of the sort and what passes for news is actually the detritus of press-conferences in Washington.

Malc is a globalist through and through, he is the man on the spot for Sacks of Gold bnk, he will do as he’s told.

The Establishment are gaia worshippers, this is a *religious war*, Malc is just another useful drone who has been promised lost of shiny ( but will ultimately be useless ) trinkets in exchange for all delivering up Australians to the globalist slaughter-house like a judas sheep…oh look…pretty trinkets….I wonder if it will be my friend….?

I understand that Germany decided to close their nuclear power stations and use so called renewable energy but as time went by the wind turbines revolution (no pun intended) resulted in an energy crisis developing, Germany had to buy electricity from coal fired power stations in Poland and from nuclear power stations in France.

The decision to close down German nuclear power stations seems to have been made because of heavy green lobbying from green blob and green party politicians. The reason excuse given was they didn’t want a repeat of the Japanese nuclear disaster at Fukushima when a tsunami hit that nuclear plant which was located on the coast.

Frau Merkel appears not to have appreciated that there is no possibility of German nuclear power stations being hit by a tsunami or some other inundation from the sea.

But hey, when did greens ever deal with or accept reality ???

They much prefer their little fantasy world and faithful belief in false-fact propaganda.

And nobody died from a nuclear problem at Fukishima – which was actually caused by a back-up power problem anyway. But then the Greens and the Left simply cannot accept that just about everything is a compromise, that people are killed manufacturing and erecting wind turbines for example.

But then the Greens and the Left simply cannot accept that just about everything is a compromise,

Nor can they accept that Nature ( Not that journal, but Real Life ) is both a bigger `polluter’ and far and away more powerful than a mere seven and a half billion animals. Until they can wrap their tiny minds around those facts, we’re going to have to suffer their inanities and stupidities for more years to come.

Dennis
Some of the German nuclear plants were due for decommissioning due to their age. The German Government pushed back the planned date for doing this. Then Fukishima occurred and under pressure from the Greens they returned to the old date and added ( I think ) no new nuclear plants would be built. So they were forced to build 15-20 new brown coal burning plants.

Now, there’s the thing, “Too bad Australia is usually 10 or so years behind the rest of the world.”.
A little further down-under the virtue-signalling Con-artistes are the University of Otago have just announced their full embrace of that eco-Marxist euphemism, “sustainability” and its associatede UNEP dogma. The move is guaranteed to install NZ 15 years behind the ball game in years to come. Coal is to be banned, the notional carbon footprint will be urgently reduced to a theoretical baby cast and the Uni will start burning renewable wood … just like Drax in London with seemingly little consideration of the unintended consequences that may have on the local market or indeed the city environment. And all this Leftist huffing and puffing in a country where 60% of base load power is hydro renewable, i.e. all domestic consumption. Surely someone will have asked them exactly how much they will have inspirationally reduced the theoretical contribution to UNFCCC defined ‘climate change’ and associated theoretical reduction in temperature anomaly?

Meanwhile in a kind of Über reality, “Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent.”

If you want prosperity, development and cheap power, neither NZ nor Australia will be the places to be. And to think that both countries were once considered to be ‘The Future’ and the ‘New World’. Instead both have fallen to their knees to worship at the altar of the UN NWO. Quite why, remains entirely beyond me.

With regard wind and solar, Australia has the South Australian test case, which is leading the world in wind and solar market share while being sufficiently isolated from the rest of the Australian grid to highlight the issues. It does get support in terms of the 600MW link to Victoria and the LGCs transfer payments from other states but, even with all that support, it is already a basket case at 40% wind and solar market share.

Germany is yet to experience a complete system blackout. Wind and solar has only achieved 33% market share in Germany.

The difference with Germany is that it has managed to retain some of its manufacturing; albeit steel making is gradually going elsewhere. The consequence of this is that it has not exported the vast majority of its CO2 production out of the country, unlike SA. Hence Germany proves the case that substituting coal and nuclear generation with wind and solar does not lower CO2 output. Building and maintaining the wind and solar components is CO2 intensive.

An aside – my son has recently bought a house and has been making use of ALDI special buys to acquire some tools, furniture and appliances. So far all the special buys have been made in China although some have familiar German brand names.

The Pharoah has ordered an end to the building of pyramids. As the people live in rudimentary huts and lack basic services, the building of enormous and pointless pyramids for a hundred years has to end and tens of thousands of Egyptians will have to find alternative employment.

The exact point of building pyramids has been long forgotten and at one stage multiple pyramids were being built simultaneously, such was the demand. The Pharoah blames the IPCC, the Infernal Pyramid Construction Company for the poverty created by the near slave conditions and the collapse of other industries in this pointless and massively expensive exercise. Later generation may puzzle that they were ever built at all.

There was a story that the Pyramids were built to appease the Climate Gods and ensure the end of the great drought which had a normal 11 year cycle and ended as always. Still the high priests lead by Scribe Flannery in cahoots with the Infernal Pyramid Construction Company claimed the drought would never end, that Luxor would become a ghost town and showed that you can fool some of the people some of the time.

Dust storms used to be more prevalent years ago in Australia. I think the last was in the earlier part of the millennium and covered much of eastern Australia in red dust. The source of the dust was the deposits left over from the drying out of flood waters in the centre. The 19th and 20th century dust storms was the result of massive stocks of sheep.Apparently. Anyway you can see the strata laid down on the Tasman Alps- red strips in the ice.All that top soil from OZ.

I suggest that “Blackout Bill” Shorten be sent to Germany for an update on how useless wind turbines really are when it comes to electricity generation. No wait: he only needs to go to South Australia for that but he has so indoctrinated himself he would be blind to the evidence.

I think that your “unclue “ is probably pretty “cluey “ really. An experience like that can really open one’s mind to the alternatives. Nice typo, I like it, I think it is a perfect description for our Malcolm.

Let me show you how the removal of subsidies has a major effect on wind power.

The only way they can make any profit from any form of power generation is to add it to the cost of generated electricity from the plant.

Keep in mind here that I am comparing one coal fired plant with just one wind plant, and the Nameplate is different, but the principle still remains.

Take a Wind Plant, and here I’ll make it a big one, say with a Nameplate of 500MW. It generates its electricity at a Capacity factor of 25%. (the current approximate average in Germany, and in reality, probably closer to 20% but I’ll go with the higher figure) So, this wind plant will generate around 1,095,750,000KWH, and I’ve put it in KWH because that is the unit that consumers pay for.

Now take the new two Unit brown coal HELE USC Neurath coal fired power plant with a Nameplate of 2200MW and a yearly power delivery of 15,874,550,000KWH, so almost 15.5 times as much power.

They can spread their profit margin over that 15 times more power, charging much less addition to the unit cost of generating the power than the wind plant can, and then on top of that, the coal fired plant has a minimum of double the lifespan, meaning they can spread that profit margin even a little thinner again.

So, if wind now has to compete on an even footing, then the coal fired power is (infinitely) cheaper than the wind power.

The only way they could turn a profit and have cheap competitively costed power was to have that cost per unit of generated power in place, and that is a part of the original contract, where the Government pays that cost per generated unit of power to the wind plant operators.

Without them, they cannot compete because coal fired power, generating huge amounts of power will always be able to spread their profit margin that little bit thinner than for wind.

So, at the proposal stage, wind plants got (sometimes up to and even more than) half of the original construction cost paid by Governments, both at a Federal and State level, as is the case even here in Australia, and also that added cost of X cents per KWH for every KWH of power that they generate. So, now only having to recover half their construction cost over the life of the plant, they can reduce the unit cost of their generated electricity (KWH) and with that subsidy, even lower again.

Can you now see why wind power seems to be cheaper than coal fired power.

Such as the Australian automotive manufacturing industry, well subsidised from the start of GMH late 1940s including government fleet sales to boost production numbers. But over time Australians chose imported vehicles 8 out of every 10 purchases. The taxpayer subsidies, and import duty, continued. The unions’ took advantage too and members churned out inferior products based on poor work practises and pushed operating costs higher and higher with well over award wages demands and way out of step with general manufacturing industry conditions.

In other words Australians were forced to pay for products that were inferior and far more expensive than imports before duty was levied.

Why is Australia no longer a logical base of manufacturing, electricity cost is of course one important consideration, unFair Work Australia industrial relations legislation is another factor and there are many others including red and green tape regulations that cost businesses considerable amounts of compliance costs.

The Australian Financial Review summed it up about two years ago from memory, figures rounded off, that employment of a skilled worker in Australia after accounting for all operating costs of a business, on average, is A$600/day. In the US (before POTUS Trump) the cost is A$400/day.

You can add white goods, electrical goods, clothing, machinery and many other things to that list. Overseas competition most certainly has had an major impact, but unions haven’t been of any help either. The other thing that’s now being screwed is farming. With expanding suburbs, market gardens and other farms are rapidly disappearing, or forced to move or close, and relocation is being stymied by the NIMBY philosophy.

You can sometimes make a case for subsidies to allow a new business to set up (though it is rare.) The trouble is that once civil servants and government have given some money, they cannot stop themselves giving more Partly it is our fault – we moan and complain if the state wastes our money – and partly it is because there is no mechanism for “state failure” in the way there is for “market failure” (misnamed as ever).

Interestingly, I worked for GE for a while, which is like working for government. They wanted employees to be entrepreneurial and try new things, but then fired anybody that failed!

The tax incentive package lawmakers handed Tesla was 13 times larger than the state’s [Nevada] previous record-breaking deal awarded to Apple for a data center project in 2012. The deal included:

$725 million in sales tax abatements over 20 years.
$332 million in real and personal property tax abatements over 10 years.
$195 million in transferable tax credits.
$27 million in payroll tax abatements over 10 years.
$8 million in electricity rate discounts over eight years.
If all goes to plan, Tesla will operate essentially tax free for a decade and at a substantial tax discount for another 10 years.

By Christos, you’ll get electric cars whether they’re any use, you like them, need them or can afford them or that they cannot fit any definition of sustainability you care to refer to.

An opportunity to showcase his snake oil! Weatherdill was a patsy in the palm of his hand! He knew he was in deep do doo’s, and along comes the Musketeer, with, I’ll solve all your problems and make this pain go away!

Ha…one easy way to fix the noxious greenistas….give a Tesla to a rancher/farmer, tell them to cut the back off it, turn it into a ute/pickup.

Now load the ute with 20 hay bales or 5 sheep, and drive it through a creek crossing with water up to the bonnet/hood.

Hear that sizzling sound and white flash with loud bang…thats water giving you a reality check that the gummint just wont.
Now repeat process iwth a diesel and notice how the diesel does it again and again.

Now convert a 4 trailer road train into batteries…notice how the road train travels approx 1 km before running out of charge. Now repeat with deisel – notice how it can go 100s of miles before requiring refueling in very harsh conditions….

Sparks are good for the clueless inner-city lefties ( who shouldnt play with harp objects, they are kiddies after all…..) , but out in the real world, the green dream just doesnt work…now why is that?

June, July, August, September, October, 2016 Germany’s land based turbines, all 27, 750 of them all generated less than an average 15% of their plated nominal capacity.

In November they reached about 24% of their plated nominal generating capacity.
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Re the GREAT LIE of the renewable’s industry in its claims of increasing employment.

Spanish researchers at the King Juan Carlos University in Madrid did the classic study on the effects on Spanish employment figures with the increasing subsidies for wind, solar, micro turbines [ lots of in Spain ] and etc renewables into the Spanish Grid way back in 2009.
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5. Despite its hyper-aggressive (expensive and extensive) “green jobs” policies it appears that Spain likely has created a surprisingly low number of jobs, two- thirds of which came in construction, fabrication and installation, one quarter in administrative positions, marketing and projects engineering, and just one out of ten jobs has been created at the more permanent level of actual operation and maintenance of the renewable sources of electricity.
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6. This came at great financial cost as well as cost in terms of jobs destroyed elsewhere in the economy.
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7. The study calculates that since 2000 Spain spent €571,138 to create each “green job”, including subsidies of more than €1 million per wind industry job.
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8. The study calculates that the programs creating those jobs also resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,500 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every “green job” created.
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9. Principally, the high cost of electricity affects costs of production and employment levels in metallurgy, non-metallic mining and food processing, beverage and tobacco industries.
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10. Each “green” megawatt installed destroys 5.28 jobs on average elsewhere in the economy: 8.99 by photovoltaics, 4.27 by wind energy, 5.05 by mini-hydro.
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11. These costs do not appear to be unique to Spain’s approach but instead are largely inherent in schemes to promote renewable energy sources.

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To an Australian it seems truly astonishing that something like this study by Spanish researchers which has been existent since 2009 and lays out in detail the effects on employment and an economy of a high penetration of the unpredictable , low efficiency, very high priced renewable energy technologies seems to have been completely ignored perhaps deliberately so by the almost our entire political, bureaucratic and academic elitist caste.

Alternatively that same cabal of renewables pushers and pimps has deliberately ignored or worse are so totally ill read on the serious and debilitating economic and employment effects of a high penetration of renewables on economies wherever they have been encouraged by insanely expensive subsidies to proliferate across an economy.

I simply can not get my mind around the utter outright arrogance and then ultimate stupidity of our political caste in promoting renewable energy by forcing our populace to finance renewable energies in all their inherent obscene gross inefficiencies with massive and forced consumer provided subsidies when the effects of a high penetration of renewables on an economy and employment has been so extensively researched in Europe and the USA.

it’s ironic in a way. Wind power in Germany is what kicked me off with a deeper understanding of wind power and its failures.

When I started doing all this, way back in 2008, and I was chasing down info on wind power, I was really puzzled that the actual output being delivered was indeed so low, when compared to Nameplate. Having never really done anything like this at all, I sort of just believed what we were being told, that (at that time) wind power was going to (outright) replace coal fired power. The more I looked, the more puzzled I became, because real data was showing me something I couldn’t believe. From there, it was a crash course in Capacity Factor (CF) and then chasing info from as many independent sources as I could possibly find.

The first time I posted about the intermittency of wind power, due to that CF, it was heart in the mouth stuff for me, because now it was in black and white, and I was even then still thinking I was somehow wrong.

I wasn’t.

Then I stumbled across something from Germany, and then it was a crash course in ‘Google Translate Page’ and when I saw that, I had an inkling now I was on the right track.

From that point forward, I contributed Posts about wind with confidence.

The first of those is at the link below, and it was in two parts, and the link to the second Posts a day later is at the bottom of this first Post. After you’ve read it, (if you want to that is) note the date at the top of the Post, October 2009. It’s amateur stuff because I was stll feeling my way around, but again, as I mentioned above, the facts are the facts.

Not following Tony. Why did you compare a 2200Mw coal plant with a 500Mw wind array? Do you mean that they are both nameplate 2200Mw and the wind is operating at 23%?

Also how do they compare in cost?

Also “the coal fired plant has a minimum of double the lifespan”. Why wouldn’t the coal fired plant have an infinite lifespan if regularly maintained and upgraded, like the axe with five new heads and four new handles. I expect a windmill is disposable. Perhaps that’s what they mean by renewable?

Tony also ignores a major problem: Green Power is unreliable Part Time Power. Proponents of so-called “renewables” should be forced to travel only in horse drawn carriages, and on tall ships over oceans.

Wind Europe, the european wind industry trade body published a lobbying paper in June 2017 calling for new or continued subsidies at the same rate as new installations for end-of-life wind turbines and end-of-subsidy wind farms.
They state that without that new subsidy then end-of-life turbines cannot be replaced and end-of-subsidy wind farms will be forced to close down. Quite the opposite of the wind industry’s publicly-made claims that wind is now competitive with (or cheaper than) conventional power generation.

You can see the lobbying paper “Repowering and Lifetime Extension – Making the most of Europe’s wind energy resource”. here

Of course they could have said “replacing and repairing”, but this would not fit the framework and may displease the stakeholders. I can’t understand why these people can’t express themselves in plain english. Maybe I shouldn’t have had a glass of red before trying to decipher their post modern drivel.

I have being fiddling with a spreadsheet and some numbers for wind farms.
For a Capacity Factor of 30% (about the reported average for Australia) and a selling price of $92 a MWh ** the ‘farm’ pays for itself in 6.15 years which is longer than most commercial decisions would require, especially with the short life of a wind turbine. At $174 a MWh (i.e. including the RET subsidy) the payback time reduces to 2 years and 8 months, a much more profitable chance.
If the capital cost dropped as low as $780 (which would have to include installation costs of roughly a third) then the payback times are 4.4 years and 2 years.

For a Capacity Factor of 18% (which is the average for German wind turbines) and a selling price of $92 then payback time is over 10 years so quite uncommercial. It would take extremely high selling prices and low construction costs to make an installation at this CF even a marginal commercial decision.

**(and running costs of $24 per MWh as per Infigen, and a capital cost of $1100 per nominal MW capacity.)

So, while construction costs have dropped somewhat, the turbine operators are forcing the wholesale selling price down as they try to force more and more output onto the grids. They are absolutely dependent on the (subsidy) payments loaded onto the retail price and if that is reduced or eliminated then those turbines are going to be abandoned.

Profit is not simply a bit extra charged above cost. It is the difference between the cost to produce by a willing seller and the price paid by a willing buyer. If there is no profit, there is no production and no future production.

For example, if you plant 100 pounds of seed potatoes. Then you harvest only 100 pounds of potatoes at the end of the growing season. You clearly have produced no potatoes. Worse, you didn’t even produce the cost to plant, cultivate, and harvest. Worse still, you didn’t even cover the cost to live during the process. In fact, you lost big time.

On the other hand, had you harvested 300 pounds of potatoes, ate 100 pounds of stored food potatoes while producing them, and sold 100 pounds of potatoes you actually produced something and earned a profit.

NOTE: subsidies are not profit, it is wealth transferred from the producer of the wealth to those who did not earn it and who used the force of government to do it. That it was voted for by the majority of voters does not change the fundamental fact that it was theft.

Profit is earned by exchanging a value you produced for the value produced by someone else. Each party in the trade values what he received more than the value he gave. Thus both parties earned a profit. The underlying mechanism is division of labor (mental and physical) such that each can produce at a lower cost what they do best.

You must look at what actually happens rather than accepting the distorted verbal misdirections offered by those interested only in taking.

Here’s an idea!
All the money wasted on “Wind Energy Jobs”, could be put into “Coal (or Nuke) Energy Jobs”.
Or, All the money wasted by energy customers on inflated prices, propping up this inefficient industry, could be spent on goods and services that people want, and the jobs to provide them.
Do these people listen to themselves?
“Waaaahhh, removing subsidies will remove subsidised jobs.”

I’m not sure what the problem is. Everyone knows renewables are now as cost effective as those outdated polluting technologies. Based on this knowledge, my modelling shows renewables going from strength to strength. Anyone who questions this must be a denier.

On the principle of energy in must equal energy out + losses, renewables are a downhill journey. All the subsidies in the World simply mess with the gradient, while the destination remains the same. In the end there will be insufficient energy and money in the World to build new windmills and photovoltaics, do great industry, prosperity and growth.

Ironically, in some ways? Sure is. This idea resembles greenhouse theory and the delay in departure of ‘heat’. Do we cook ourselves to oblivion or harness all the extra heat for a free ride?
Not a chance. Neither. Not even with a millennium of Paris’ one after the other.

Well, that just leaves half to one quarter yet to dispose of. But why dawdle? The Germans have been expanding coal for years, even while Angela was singing her green serenades for the Guardian-perusing classes.

Germany was able to rebuild after war. It will have to rebuild after Big Green. (Might help if it ditches its crummy empire. Those captive markets won’t be worth all the Mediterranean lead in the saddlebags as customers become beggars. And recent peer-reviewed studies have shown you can only rob taxpayers to save lenders about fifty times before taxpayers start to notice.)

There is nothing wrong with renewables if you are OK with unreliable
expensive power . The public has paid dearly for this politically correct exercise
to control the earth’s temperature . Unfortunately the public will probably pay
when the subsidy industry flames out too .
Who is going to pay to remove the bankrupt bird blenders from the landscape ?
Not the guys pounding back umbrella drinks in Maui that’s for sure .

Australia must be the most backward looking nation on the planet. We have so many politicians and much of the MSM still telling everyone that we must move to renewables with great haste yet all other nations are taking a cautious and practical approach by building mixed power generation solutions that include nuclear, coal and renewables since it’s the ONLY way to provide reliable electricity at minimal cost. To do otherwise, like we are, is committing not only economic suicide but tantamount to a direct attack on our nation, which under any other circumstances would be considered and treated as a very serious crime.

The red flag will go up when energy poverty starts to bite, huge swathes of the lower middle class falling below the poverty line. We are talking about hard working Australians depending on the bank of mum and dad to survive.

The pseudo Marxist consortium of politicians and corrupt media need to be brought into line, but my crystal ball is foggy on this and I was wondering if you can visualise Australia in 2020?

While back in that model windmill province of Canada, Ontario, Winnie the Poo is busy with the d.u.n.g shovel burying the bloody contrarian evidence of her “The Wind is free in the willows” project in the political basement of failed ideas….

Those idiots. I wondered where they were getting the money to reduce my bill. I knew they weren’t addressing the root causes, so it had to be some kind of funny money. I’m sure my kids will love paying that back with lots of interest…

Yes it is clear that the writing is on the wall as far as so called renewables is concerned.

However there is one inescapable truism. Irrespective of whether we face warming or cooling, the essential factor in surviving comfortably, is a supply of abundant, reliable and affordable electrical energy.

I guess we can be thankful that Germany and some other Euro nations have now shown that wind and reliable electricity don’t mix. Maybe Malcolm can stop the subsidies before 2020.
Any 2nd hand market for used wind towers?

They may have shown that renewable energy and reliable energy are an oxymoron and incompatible BUT there is little sign that this truism is yet sinking into or making any impact on political brains.

Civil services are full of people who were green-washed at school and university and they ‘advise’ politicians based on the latest green blob propaganda they have swallowed and can’t wait to regurgitate into ‘policy’

the CAGW “renewables” mob are putting the hit on China. Reuters leaves it for the reader to work out the extra cost of raising the target for non-fossil fuel from 15% to 26% (setting aside how sincere China is about the 15% target in the first place):

17 Oct: Thomson Reuters Foundation: China needs tougher clean fuel targets to meet Paris climate pact: report
Reporting by Muyu Xu and Josephine Mason; Editing by Tom Hogue
China will have to launch more ambitious renewable energy and non-fossil fuel targets and ramp up efforts to enforce them to avoid missing global climate accord requirements, two government think tanks said on Monday.
China’s capacity for renewable energy, including hydro, wind and solar, will significantly exceed Beijing’s own target set in the five-year plan to 2020, according to the report jointly issued by China National Renewable Energy Centre (CNREC) and the Energy Research Institute of Academy of Macroeconomic Research.

The world’s top energy consumer pledged to install 340 gigawatts (GW) of hydropower capacity, 210 GW of wind and 110 GW solar by 2020 in the five-year plan.
But to meet commitments agreed to in 2015 in the Paris global pact to fight climate change, China should raise its target for non-fossil fuel to 26 percent of its total energy mix from a current target of 15 percent by 2020, the report said.

“The Paris agreement of reducing the global temperature by two degrees puts pressure on the short-term energy transition from coal and oil to non-fossil fuels,” said Wang Zhongying, deputy director general at CNREC…

Still, getting stranded clean power in the west to urban users has been a major headache for the government as Beijing seeks wean the nation off coal, the nation’s favorite fuel.
An official at the National Energy Administration said at the conference on Monday he reckons the country will solve the problem of wasted energy by 2020…

The Chinese saw through the AGW scam years ago. They have used the installation of renewables as
1. a publicity stunt for gullible westerners
2. a way of introducing some electricity to remote areas before the grid can built to them.
3. a way of subsiding turbine and PV panel manufacturers (with economy of scale) so they can grab the overseas market.

There is no way they are going to raise the amount of unreliable generation just because some AGW believers are getting frantic as the scam disappears down the gurgler.

I don’t think batteries are eligible BUT does it matter? Taxpayers in SA are still forking out an undisclosed amount but thought to be at least $100 million to buy Musk’s Big Battery, the principal purpose of which will be to act as a tourist attraction representing the failure of critical thinking and Leftist pagan idolatry of Gaia / Γαῖα and of course enriching Musk personally using his business model of fooling illiterate and stupid Leftist politicians into transferring large amounts of victim-taxpayer’s money to his accounts.

Dave:
don’t forget the extra cost of the advertising program (funded by the public) about how “we are seizing control of our electricity system”.

So far this has publically meant “the world’s biggest battery” (1), a supposedly on/off decision to install lots of diesel generators (2) and the HUGE solar heat tower near Pt. Augusta (3).
(1) it won’t be.
(2) According to the electrician who installed my generator these diesel units are being installed but have only been hired for a year or more. The 9 Open Cycle Gas Turbines which replaced the prevvious thought bubble (and which will burn diesel) will be temporarily installed some time after the election, then moved to permanent homes sometime in the future.
(3) This is the biggest lie of them all. As Tony has pointed out these things depend on the 5 hours when the sun is shining high in the sky to generate the storage. Effectively 70MW seems possible if they only operate for the morning and evening peak hours, otherwise if they are run 24 hours a day then around 36MW average output with 3 months shut down in winter.

Teslas storage battery prices are well known. Even Wiki has them recorded at us$400,000 /MWh installed.
So for SAs 129MWh BFB, that sums up to about us$50 million….say Au$60 million.
But also, Musk offered to “share” that cost as this will be the first such installation with a high power output (100 MW)……so SA may end up with a bargain at a mere $30 million. ?

Clean up cost ?..really ?
Im not supporting this battery idea, but of all the angles to pick, you probably found the weakest.
This isnt some leaky collection of lead acid car batteries, or a mountain of used Ever Ready’s…if/when they fail as a grid buffer, they can be repurposed as a great emergency back up packs for a few remote community hospitals etc.
Worst case, Tesla has a complete recycling process for these batteries.
OR..currently, used/salvaged EV lithium packs sell for big money on Ebay !!
…if you want to worry about clean up, i would be thinking of that 30,000 tons of molten salt JW is planning for SA. ,

The Golden Valley Electric Association (GVEA), the cooperative that provides power to the Fairbanks area, powered up BESS, aka the Battery Energy Storage System. Larger than a football field and weighing 1,500 tons, BESS exists to ensure continuity of electric service. If the supply of electricity coming in from relatively distant coal plants to the south is interrupted, BESS kicks in until local power plants can be put online.

BESS can hold things down powerwise for all of seven minutes. It functions as what’s known as a spinning reserve. It’s a bridge between primary and backup power and is generally taken to mean some amount of excess generating capacity that is at any given time pre-synchronized to the grid. If power goes down, switching the spinning reserve on should be seamless.

overall, none of these huge , expensive batteries will provide any meaningful cover for a failed power supply, but they do provide a fill in for switching over to other generation sources, and most critically they can provide frequency stabilization for the grid , which is a primary cause of blackouts when a generator has to be taken off line to protect itself from grid frequency changes.

Just heard a sickening interview on ABC-RN Radio and the warmist said Turnbull’s supposed restrictions on unreliables will cause electricity prices to go up (because we all know unreliables are much cheaper and better than evil polluting coal). I had to turn it off. One moron “interviewing” another moron.

Five hours later and that pesky wind still won’t cooperate with the two failed communist states , almost makes me want to shed a tear ! It’s ok I’ll turn the pool pump the aircons and the shed lights off soon I promise .

In the same week we have seen Turnbull belittle Abbott’s speech and then implement one of the key points.
The disgusting performance of Turnbull as PM is being cunningly concealed by the press. Why?
He is a disgrace.

CleanEnergyWire reports that the end of subsidies threatens the profitability of nearly all wind plants due to maintenance costs:

Subsidies are NOT profit because they are not earned by voluntary trade between buyer and seller of their OWNED value. They are one way legalized theft – a transfer of wealth from its creator to a parasite by means of government force.

Note: a reduction in taxes is not a subsidy. It is the government not taking quite as much wealth from its producer by force – a reduction in theft.

IPCC physics has been fraudulent since 1976. The 33 K GHE claim is false, based on fake physics buried in the text of R D Cess 1976, backed up in the same year by fake ‘negative convection’ in GISS 2d modelling, admitted by Hansen to an AIP interviewer 25 years later.

The real physics is defined by self-absorption of atmospheric GHG molecules. The fully self-absorbed GHGs near the surface turn off about 60% of surface radiant exitance because of the equal IR density of states across the boundary. That transfers each band’s IR emitting surface to be at whatever altitude loses self-absorption, about 20 km for CO2 15 micron. There is no atmospheric heating from surface IR.

Furthermore, subject to constant tsi, there can be no GHG warming of the surface; the temperature is held constant by negative feedback from the very strong dependence of partial self absorption by 16-23 micron water vapour GHG bands. plus other feedbacks including 15% more green Earth.

For 40 years we have had a group of scientists connected with various state organisations who have been pushing the GHG warming concept to trace [CO2] variation, when it doesn’t exist. The true PID control system is subtle with new physics including enhanced extinction factor for rain clouds missed by van der Hulst and Hansen in the late 1960.

This is a new phlogiston: that theory collapsed in 3 years; same for CESS’ claims, which no professional accepts, no matter the insults of those who have ridden the grant gravy train for 40 years and made terrible mistakes. E.g., Goody and Yung’s bidirectional photon diffusion theory failed to understand that Planck 1913 assumed a vacuum and a pyrgeometer signal, >95% from a theoretical calculation of internal reference S-B emission, is a radiant exitance, not an energy flux.

The only net IR radiant exitance is the atmospheric window, which cannot heat the atmosphere, so goes to space. Cosmic microwave background offsets a tiny part of the AW signal. There is an oscillation of surface exitance about the mean due to local surface air radiant excitation fluctuations. NASA knows this but couldn’t measure it, so model it.

18 Oct: Reuters: COLUMN-Fuel security and power generation in the United States:
by John Kemp
“The resiliency of the nation’s electric grid is threatened by the premature retirements of power plants that can withstand major fuel supply disruptions caused by natural or man-made disasters,” the U.S. Department of Energy warned last week.
Fuel security is the crux of the argument made by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry in proposing a new grid resiliency pricing rule to save coal-fired and nuclear power plants from closure.
“Fuel-secure resources are indispensable for the reliability and resiliency of our electric grid,” the Department of Energy wrote in its justification for the proposed rule, which was gazetted in the Federal Register on Oct. 10.

Gas-fired power plants can generate large amounts of electricity and provide crucial reliability services to the grid, including frequency regulation, reactive power and voltage support, operating reserves and black start.
In most respects, gas-fired power plants, including highly efficient combined-cycle units, can provide generation and ancillary services more cheaply and flexibly than their coal-fired and nuclear counterparts.
But unlike coal-fired and nuclear power plants, gas-fired generators do not typically store large amounts of fuel on site, which makes them vulnerable to any disruption of their supply chain…

The growing number of gas-fired power plants on the grid has increased the interdependency between the gas and electricity systems.
“Growing reliance on natural gas continues to raise reliability concerns,” the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) wrote in a synopsis of reliability issues prepared for the energy secretary…

The fear is that growing interdependency might leave regulators with a choice between keeping the lights on and keeping homes warm during the darkest and coldest days of winter…
“During the polar vortex, the cold weather also increased demand for natural gas, which resulted in a significant amount of gas-fired generation being unavailable,” NERC wrote in a post-event study…

Gas-fired generators accounted for 55 percent of forced outages during the vortex, even though they represented only 40 percent of capacity in the impacted areas.
By contrast, coal-fired units accounted for 26 percent of outages and 31 percent of capacity, while nuclear generators suffered 3 percent of the outages but provided 12 percent of capacity…

But it is not the only time that unusually cold weather has disrupted power generation in the eastern United States.
For example, there were major cold weather incidents in Texas in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2011, according to a joint report prepared for NERC and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Cold weather events of 1989 and 2011 were particularly severe, causing widespread power outages with rolling blackouts…

underfunded maintenance, huh?
Shocking, that.
Of a par with underfunded pensions, unfilled rainy day funds,
and unfillable potholes.
There is another industry that lives high in the hog we can shut down…
the one that makes forecasts for government.
Like, ridership for mass transit, economic impact for stadiums, jobs created by raising, or lowering taxes,
improvements in reading by paying teachers more, or, in this case, the glory of wind power.
Where else can you make an upper class income for being wildly wrong every. single. time.

The problem is not an end to subsidies, the problem, is a lack of battery storage which more than doubles the cost of wind farm electric power.
Germany has reach the hard engineering limit of wind and solar. Germany has installed wind and solar that is 100% of base German power load for the peak nameplate rating of the wind and solar installation. The problem is German wind and solar installation runs at less than 20% average efficiency.

German wind and solar total power output varies from 100% of grid output to close to zero. Germany has 100% natural gas/coal back-up to supply the 80% of power when the wind does not blow and the sun is not shining.

It is cheaper to pay wind farms to not produce electricity when there is no demand for electricity than to install battery systems. Installing more wind farms will result in more wind farms being payed to not produce electricity which will result in no increase in ‘green’ energy.

German CO2 ‘savings’ do not include the energy input required to build, install, maintain, and replace wind and solar systems and does not include the energy loss to use single cycle natural gas turbines that can be turned on/off/on/off/on/off as compared to the 20% more efficient combined cycle (produce steam from the waste heat from the first pass turbines) natural gas power plants that take 10 hours to start and hence cannot be turned on/off/on/off/on/off multiple times per day in respond to changes in wind speed.

Comment: The EU is also cutting down forests to burn in power plants which results in also no net reduction in CO2 emissions. This is how EU get their phony quoted ‘renewable’ energy above 10%.

The ties that bind Get Up to Labor, ‘ The Australian’ 12 August 2017.
Bill Shorten founding Board Director and big donor of Union Funds,
Lachlan Harris, founding Staff Member and former Media Adviser to
Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd, Phil Ireland, Union director chairman
Get Up – and others.

If “renewable” energy was ever viable in a free market and was as good as claimed (cheaper, free etc.) the marketplace would have embraced it, investors would have flocked to it and it would never had needed the massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the form of so-called subsidies or whatever other term is used to describe them.

As I always say it is never a good business model to rely on subsidies or other protections from the free market so there is no need to feel sympathy for those greedy anti-free-market investors when they lose after the Green Dream collapses.

*Green Dream is also the colloquial name for the pentobarbital euthanising solution used by vets (and also for humans in the Netherlands).

Are there any figures that let you convert the cost of coal per ton to cost of kWh of electricity produced? Obviously they would be fairly rough but I think it would be interesting to convert the cost of exported Australian coal into what foreign customers pay for electricity produced with it.

18 Oct: Reuters: Nina Chestney: EBRD board approves $500 mln loan for TANAP gas pipeline project
(Additional reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel in Brussels; Editing by Dale Hudson)
The board of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has approved a $500 million loan for the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP), the largest part of a $40 billion project to bring new gas supplies to Europe…

The so-called Southern Gas Corridor is expected to bring around 16 billion cubic metres per year to Europe by 2020 from the Shah Deniz 2 field in Azerbaijan via TANAP through Turkey, the South Caucasus pipeline extension through Georgia and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) to Greece, Albania and Italy.
Shah Deniz 2 is one of the world’s largest gas fields and is developed by a BP-led consortium…

The World Bank has committed $800 million of financing and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has committed $600 million…
The project is progressing on time, said Eric Rasmussen, director of natural resources at the London-based EBRD.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) is also considering $2 billion of financing for TANAP, but its final decision is not expected until next month, Rasmussen said…

China expects to solve the problem of renewable energy going to waste by 2020, an official at the National Energy Administration (NEA) said on Monday, as the government takes aim at one of the biggest challenges in its efforts to promote clean energy.
Liang Zhipeng, deputy director of the NEA’s new energy and renewable energy department, also said at a conference that the agency expects the wind sector to wean itself off government subsidies by 2022.

Wind power is often wasted as there is not enough transmission capacity to handle all the electricity generated, resulting in curtailments. But in the first three quarters of this year, curtailment dropped 7 percentage points, he said.
Getting stranded power in the west to urban users in the world’s top energy consumer has been a major headache for the government…

Anyone who watches the dash board will know the juggling that the AEMO does to keep power to the eastern states .
Since temps have started to rise it’s becoming more apparent that once the unreliables suffer from low wind or low light we struggle , but as the demand for electricity goes up we also struggle regardless.
We in Victoriastan rely more and more on outside influences to keep the lights on and if just one happens to fail such as the basslink cable we are going to be in trouble as well as SA .

18 Oct: DailyTelegraph: Audit makes mockery of E10’s lower emission claims
KYLAR LOUSSIKIAN, EXCLUSIVE
LOWER greenhouse gas emissions from supposedly environmentally friendly E10 petrol have never been verified by official testing in NSW.
A Daily Telegraph investigation has found auditors of government-approved monopoly supplier of ethanol fuel Manildra are hired by the company and simply accept its assurances about E10 emissions.
A “commercial-in-confidence” Manildra audit report also shows “there is no legislative requirement in Australia for biofuel producers to have lower (greenhouse gas) emissions than fossil fuel derived petrol and diesel”.

The situation has raised concerns in the Department of Fair Trading about the green-friendly claims by Manildra — a major political donor to both the Coalition and ALP — about E10 which is mandated for sale at NSW petrol stations.

In briefings provided in March last year to then Fair Trading Minister Victor Dominello, Manildra said E10 “delivers a 30 per cent reduction of greenhouse gases and other harmful exhaust emissions”.
Fair Trading bureaucrats visited Manildra’s plant in June to check the claim.
A chain of internal emails show Fair Trading staff — ­including the director of consumer protection — were concerned auditors “do not do anything to confirm or deny the information given to them by the company concerned”.
“The auditor makes it quite clear that he has issued the certificate based on information supplied by Manildra,” Fair Trading’s director of consumer protection Michael Cooper wrote.

18 Oct: Guardian: Adam Vaughan: Shell to open electric vehicle charging points at UK petrol stations
Oil firm’s first step into UK electric car sector allows drivers to rapid charge battery at handful of forecourts from this week
Drivers will be able to recharge 80% of their battery in half an hour at forecourts in London, Surrey and Derby from this week, with a total of 10 service stations to be equipped with rapid chargers by the end of the year…
The move marks the Shell’s first step into the UK electric car sector and comes days after the Anglo-Dutch oil company bought NewMotion, a Dutch firm with 30,000 private charging points at homes and offices in Europe…

Shell said the forays into charging were spurred by the swift growth in battery-powered cars, which now number more than 115,000 in the UK, up from almost zero a decade ago…

BOLD SUB-HEADING: There are now more than 115,000 electric cars in the UK…

Shell acknowledged it was taking baby steps into the market, with just 10 out of its 1,000 fuelling stations in the UK adding charging points to begin with…
The company is also catering for the tiny number of hydrogen cars on UK roads – believed to number as few as 50 – and this year installed a hydrogen pump at its Cobham services on the M25. Shell will have three stations with hydrogen refuelling by the end of the year.

With rapid electric charging points typically costing $30,000-$50,000 (£22,700-£38,000) each, the 10 electric charging stations mark a minuscule fraction of the $25bn Shell spends on oil each year.
But industry watchers said the infrastructure and recent acquisition were noteworthy…

Colin McKerracher, an analyst at ***Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said: “I think it is significant that a major oil company is investing in charging infrastructure and that they bought NewMotion…
Greenpeace, which has previously protested at Shell’s UK service stations over its oil drilling plans, said the country needed more charging points…

Branded Shell Recharge, the charging points will cost a discounted 25p per kilowatt hour of power until next June, when the price will revert to its normal level of 49p per kWh.
At the normal price, that means recharging a Nissan Leaf from virtually flat to a full charge would cost nearly £20, while a top-end Tesla Model S would cost almost £50…
Shell said that in a handful of cases it paid for upgrades to the local energy grid, to make it capable of handling the rapid charging points…https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/18/shell-to-open-electric-vehicle-charging-points-at-uk-petrol-stations

***Bloomberg’s own rave didn’t bother to mention the “minor” detail that it would take half an hour to recharge 80% of the battery:

18 Oct: Guardian: John Abraham: CliFi – A new way to talk about climate change
If you’re not familiar with the new genre of climate fiction, you might be soon.
What makes a Cli-Fi novel good? Well in my opinion, it has to have some real science in it. And it has to get the science right…

As I write this, we are getting a steady stream of stories out of Puerto Rico the island was devastated by Hurricane Maria. It is hard to imagine the devastation, what life is like without electricity, food, or water. What is life like on an island of 3 million people, each fending for themselves, just trying to survive…

17 Oct: PittsburghLive: Wes Venteicher: Al Gore brings global warming message to Pittsburgh, warns of its effect on Pennsylvania
Climate change is impacting life in Pennsylvania, and its effects will become increasingly obvious as the century progresses, former vice president Al Gore told a room of 1,300 people at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh on Tuesday.
Gore tucked state-specific stats into a two-hour presentation peppered with images of melting roads, collapsing glaciers, flooded cities and other dramatic weather events scientists have linked to climate change.
The presentation was part of a Climate Reality Leadership Corps meeting…
Pittsburgh, which recorded five so-called “excessive heat events” per year from 1975 to 1995, could experience 45 of them per year between 2020 and 2029, Gore said, and even more toward the end of the century…
Much of the heat trapped in the atmosphere makes its way into the oceans, he said. Cool water in the Gulf of Mexico that had weakened hurricanes approaching the United States has warmed, making it more likely that stronger storms will make landfall, he said…

and this one:

17 Oct: Reuters: Alister Doyle: Fiji urges “absolute dedication” to toughest climate target
OSLO: Fiji is hosting a preparatory meeting of delegates before the Nov. 6-17 talks in Bonn, Germany, where environment ministers from around the world will work on a set of international guidelines for the Paris accord.
“We can no longer ignore this (climate) crisis,” Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama said in an address to the delegates…
“It’s hard to find any part of the world that is unaffected” by a changing climate, he said, listing Atlantic storms such as Ophelia battering Ireland, wildfires in California, Portugal and Spain, and floods in Nigeria, India and Bangladesh…

Many scientists say that the 1.5 degree goal is fast slipping out of reach because of insufficient action by almost all governments to rein in climate change…

In Oslo, Hoesung Lee, head of the U.N. panel of climate scientists which is studying the 1.5C goal, declined to say whether early drafts indicated it was still feasible.
“The conclusion will be available one year from now… we should be patient,” he told reporters in Oslo after a meeting with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg.
Solberg said the Paris temperature targets had to be built into wider development goals. “We have to make sure that we do have job creation, fight poverty at the same time,” she said.http://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-fiji/fiji-urges-absolute-dedication-to-toughest-climate-target-idUSKBN1CM1GN

Wikipedia: “The Uninhabitable Earth” is a New York magazine article by American journalist David Wallace-Wells published on July 9, 2017. The long-form article depicts a pessimistic worst-case scenario of what might happen in the near-future due to global warming…
The story received immediate criticism from the climate change community along two fronts: the piece is too pessimistic; or it contains some factual errors…
The major criticism is that David Wallace-Wells was trying to scare people…

well, Wallace-Wells has doubled down…and this is just the first para!

11 Oct: New York Mag: David Wallace-Wells: This Isn’t ‘the New Normal’ for Climate Change — That Will Be Worse
It’s been a terrifying season for what we used to call natural disasters. For the first time in recorded history, three hurricanes arose simultaneously in the Caribbean. Harvey and Irma ravaged a series of islands then turned north and hit the U.S. mainland. Days later came Maria, the third storm this season to register among the top-four most devastating hurricanes in dollar terms to ever make landfall in the U.S. (Maria seems likely to be remembered as among the worst humanitarian disasters America has ever seen, with 40 percent of Puerto Rico still without running water, power out for likely six months, and native agriculture devastated for a full year.) For years, we’ve conceived of climate change in terms of sea level, meaning it was often possible to believe its devastating impacts would be felt mostly by those living elsewhere, on the coasts; extreme weather seems poised to break that delusion, beginning with hurricanes. And then the unprecedented California wildfires broke out over the weekend, fueled by the Diablo Winds, killing 17 already and burning through 115,000 acres across several counties by Wednesday, casting even the sky above Disneyland in an eerie postapocalyptic orange glow and lighting up satellite images with flames visible from space. The smoke was visible from there, too…http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/10/why-this-isnt-the-new-normal-for-climate-change.html

VIDEO: 16 Oct: YaleClimateConnections: Peter Sinclair: Using emotion in discussing climate change
Climate and social scientists offer suggestions on how – and how not – to discuss climate change.
Wait. Stop reading right here. Don’t dare think of an elephant.
Didn’t work, did it. Just mentioning it implanted it in your mind, in your consciousness.
It’s an argument made by Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, among others, and a key point in climate communicators’ lessons on how to – and how not to – talk about that dreaded “climate change” term.

In this month’s Yale Climate Connections “This Is Not Cool” video, by regular contributor and independent videographer Peter Sinclair, Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe points out that the “greatest advances” in understanding of climate change over the past decade have come not from the physical sciences, but from the social sciences.

A mere headline along the lines of “Myth XYZ” implants that myth, even if subsequently and thoroughly “debunked,” in the audience’s mind, says John Cook of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “After time, all the details fade,” says Cook, the founder of the Skeptical Science website. “And all they can remember is the headline,” reinforcing the myth…

TV meteorologist Amber Sullins of ABC 15 in Phoenix says avoiding the words “global warming or climate change” is part of her strategy to avoid turning-off some of her audience. “You remove those two words and just talk about how they’re going to be affected as things change,” she says, “and they’re much more open to listening.”…

“You want to introduce people to the field of climate science?” (climate scientist Sarah Myhre of the University of Washington) asks rhetorically. “You got to say something like, yeah, this hurt, this is scary. You have to say, ‘Hey, I want to ski with my kid in the future. I want to eat salmon in the future … I have a stake in this, I am invested, I am not separate from this. And I do have emotions around this, and I share this with you.”
VIDEEO: 5mins13secs: LOTS OF JOHN COOK; ALSO INCLUDES STEPHAN LEWANDOWSKY
CREDITS: made with support of Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environmenthttps://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2017/10/using-emotion-discussing-climate-change/

18 Oct: EveningStandardUK: More hurricane-force storms could hit UK because of climate change, experts warn
by Ella Wills, Francesca Gillett
“There is evidence that hurricane-force storms hitting the UK, like Ophelia, will be enhanced in the future due to human-induced climate change,” said Dr Dann Mitchell, a research fellow studying global and regional climate change at the University of Bristol.
He said Ophelia was “a very interesting” storm because it formed in the tropics and moved north. “It was already quite rare,” he said…
Dr Mitchell, who is researching climate change over the past century and next 100 years, added: “We’re not going to see a sudden dramatic change in storms. We may see some change at some point.”…

Martin Bowles, from the Met Office, said: “It’s never happened exactly like this [Ophelia]…
“We have had situations where tropical hurricanes have come fairly close, but not very often”…
“In this particular case, because we had a warm stream of air, it lasted a lot longer”.

If wind and solar electricity generation worked, it would have been introduced after the 1973 oil crisis, it was not because engineers designed and operated the whole industry. Now politicians own and operate it. See the Irish Energy Blog and my web site Valmartin Ireland Your tube. Renewable don’t work